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7 Articles

Mining And Refining: Tungsten

April 2, 2024 by 16 Comments

Our metallurgical history is a little bit like a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, only without the paper; we’re always looking for something hard enough to cut whatever the current hardest metal is. We started with copper, the first metal to be mined and refined. But then we needed something to cut copper, so we ended up with alloys like bronze, which demanded harder metals like iron, and eventually this arms race of cutting led us to steel, the king of metals.

But even a king needs someone to keep him in check, and while steel can be used to make tools hard enough to cut itself, there’s something even better for the job: tungsten, or more specifically tungsten carbide. We produced almost 120,000 tonnes of tungsten in 2022, much of which was directed to the manufacture of tungsten carbide tooling. Tungsten has the highest melting point known, 3,422 °C, and is an extremely dense, hard, and tough metal. Its properties make it an indispensible industrial metal, and it’s next up in our “Mining and Refining” series.

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This Week In Security: Magic Packets, GPU.zip, And Enter The Sandman

September 29, 2023 by 4 Comments

Leading out the news this week is a report of “BlackTech”, an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) group that appears to be based out of China, that has been installing malicious firmware on routers around the world. This firmware has been found primarily on Cisco devices, and Cisco has released a statement clarifying their complete innocence and lack of liability in the matter.

It seems that this attack only works on older Cisco routers, and the pattern is to log in with stolen or guessed credentials, revert the firmware to a yet older version, and then replace it with a malicious boot image. But the real fun here is the “magic packets”, a TCP or UDP packet filled with random data that triggers an action, like enabling that SSH backdoor service. That idea sounds remarkable similar to Fwknop, a project I worked on many years ago. It would be sort of surreal to find some of my code show up in an APT.

Don’t Look Now, But Is Your GPU Leaking Pixels

There’s a bit debate on who’s fault this one is, as well as how practical of an attack it is, but the idea is certainly interesting. Compression has some interesting system side effects, and it’s possible for a program with access to some system analytics to work out the state of that compression. The first quirk being leveraged here is that GPU accelerated applications like a web browser use compression to stream the screen view from the CPU to the GPU. But normally, that’s way too many pixels and colors to try to sort out just by watching the CPU and ram power usage.

And that brings us to the second quirk, that in Chrome, one web page can load a second in an iframe, and then render CSS filters on top of the iframe. This filter ability is then used to convert the page to black and white tiles, and then transform the white tiles into a hard-to-compress pattern, while leaving the black ones alone. With that in place, it’s possible for the outer web page to slowly recreate the graphical view of the iframe, leaking information that is displayed on the page.

And this explains why this isn’t the most practical of attacks, as it not only requires opening a malicious page to host the attack, it also makes some very obvious graphical changes to the screen. Not to mention taking at least 30 minutes of data leaking to recreate a username displayed on the Wikipedia page. What it lacks in practicality, this approach makes up for in cleverness and creativity, though. The attack goes by the GPU.zip moniker, and the full PDF is available. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Magic Packets, GPU.zip, And Enter The Sandman” →

This Week In Security: The Facebook Leak, The YouTube Leak, And File Type Confusion

April 9, 2021 by 21 Comments

Facebook had a problem, way back in the simpler times that was 2019. Something like 533 million accounts had the cell phone number associated with the account leaked. It’s making security news this week, because that database has now been released for free in its entirety. The dataset consists of Facebook ID, cell number, name, location, birthday, bio, and email address. Facebook has pointed out that the data was not a hack or breach, but was simply scraped prior to a vulnerability being fixed in 2019.

The vulnerability was in Facebook’s contact import service, also known as the “Find Friends” feature. The short explanation is that anyone could punch a random phone number in, and get a bit of information about the FB account that claimed that number. The problem was that some interfaces to that service didn’t have appropriate rate limiting features. Combine that with Facebook’s constant urging that everyone link a cell number to their account, and the default privacy setting that lets anyone locate you by your cell number, and the data scraping was all but inevitable. The actual technique used may have been to spoof that requests were coming from the official Facebook app.

[Troy Hunt]’s Have i been pwned service has integrated this breach, and now allows searching by phone number, so go check to see if you’re one of the exposed. If you are, keep the leaked data in mind every time an email or phone call comes from someone you don’t know. Continue reading “This Week In Security: The Facebook Leak, The YouTube Leak, And File Type Confusion” →

This Week In Security: Mysterious Mac Malware, An Elegant VMware RCE, And A JSON Mess

February 26, 2021 by 10 Comments

There’s a new malware strain targeting MacOS, Silver Sparrow, and it’s unusual for a couple reasons. First, it’s one of the few pieces of malware that targets the new M1 ARM64 processors. Just a reminder, that is Apple’s new in-house silicon design. It’s unusual for a second reason — it’s not doing anything. More precisely, while researchers have been watching, the command and control infrastructure didn’t provide a payload. Silver Sparrow has been positively found on nearly 30,000 machines.

The malware also has an intentional kill switch, where the presence of a particular file triggers a complete removal of the malware package. Researchers at Red Canary point out that this package behaves very much like a legitimate program, difficult to pick out as malware. Ars Technica got an off-the-record statement from Apple, indicating that they are tracking the situation, and have revoked the developer’s certificate used to sign the malware. It’s not entirely clear whether this prevents the malware running on already compromised machines, or just stops new infections.

So who’s behind Silver Sparrow? The observed stealth mode and other complexities suggest that this is more than a simple adware or ransomware campaign. Since it was discovered before the payload was delivered, we may never know what the purpose is. It may have been a government created campaign, targeting something specific. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Mysterious Mac Malware, An Elegant VMware RCE, And A JSON Mess” →

What’s The Deal With Snap Packages?

June 24, 2020 by 150 Comments

Who would have thought that software packaging software would cause such a hubbub? But such is the case with snap. Developed by Canonical as a faster and easier way to get the latest versions of software installed on Ubuntu systems, the software has ended up starting a fiery debate in the larger Linux community. For the more casual user, snap is just a way to get the software they want as quickly as possible. But for users concerned with the ideology of free and open source software, it’s seen a dangerous step towards the types of proprietary “walled gardens” that may have drove them to Linux in the first place.

Perhaps the most vocal opponent of snap, and certainly the one that’s got the most media attention, is Linux Mint. In a June 1st post on the distribution’s official blog, Mint founder Clement Lefebvre made it very clear that the Ubuntu spin-off does not approve of the new package format and wouldn’t include it on base installs. Further, he announced that Mint 20 would actively block users from installing the snap framework through the package manager. It can still be installed manually, but this move is seen as a way to prevent it from being added to the system without the user’s explicit consent.

The short version of Clement’s complaint is that the snap packager installs from a proprietary Canonical-specific source. If you want to distribute snaps, you have to set up an account with Canonical and host it there. While the underlying software is still open source, the snap packager breaks with long tradition of having the distribution of the software also being open and free. This undoubtedly makes the install simple for naive users, and easier to maintain for Canonical maintainers, but it also takes away freedom of choice and diversity of package sources.

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This Week In Security: Nintendo Accounts, Pernicious Android Malware, And An IOS 0-day

April 24, 2020 by 8 Comments

A rash of Nintendo account compromises has made the news over the last week. Nintendo’s official response was that they were investigating, and recommended everyone enabled two factor authentication on their accounts.

[Dan Goodin] over at Ars Technica has a canny guess: The compromised accounts were each linked to an old Nintendo Network ID (NNID). This is essentially a legacy Nintendo account — one made in the Wii U and 3DS era. Since they’re linked, access via the NNID exposes the entire account. Resetting the primary account password doesn’t change the NNID credentials, but turning on two factor authentication does seem to close the loophole. There hasn’t yet been official confirmation that NNIDs are responsible, but it seems to fit the situation. It’s an interesting problem, where a legacy account can lead to further compromise.

Just Can’t Lose You: xHelper

xHelper, an Android malware, just won’t say goodbye. xHelper looks like a cleaner application, but once installed it begins rather stubbornly installing itself via the Triada trojan. The process begins with rooting the phone, and then remounting /system as writable. Binaries are installed and startup scripts are tampered with, and then the mount command itself is compromised, preventing a user from following the same steps to remove the malware. Additionally, if the device has previously been rooted, the superuser binary is removed. This combination of techniques means that the infection will survive a factory reset. The only way to remove xHelper is to flash a clean Android image, fully wiping /system in the process. Continue reading “This Week In Security: Nintendo Accounts, Pernicious Android Malware, And An IOS 0-day” →

An Antenna That Really Cooks–Really

June 19, 2017 by 19 Comments

[9A4OV] set up a receiver using the HackRF board and an LNA that can receive the NOAA 19 satellite. Of course, a receiver needs an antenna, and he made one using a cooking pot. The antenna isn’t ideal – at least indoors – but it does work. He’s hoping to tweak it to get better reception. You can see videos of the antenna and the resulting reception, below.

The satellite is sending High-Resolution Picture Transmission (HRPT) data which provides a higher image quality than Automatic Picture Transmission (APT). APT is at 137 MHz, but HRPT is at 1698 MHz and typically requires a better receiver and antenna system.

Continue reading “An Antenna That Really Cooks–Really” →